The Man in the Queue

This detective story, published in 1929, introduces Inspector Alan Grant of the Criminal Investigation Department. He is leading the investigation into the murder of a man in a queue outside a theatre in London's West End. At the start of his involvement not only can the murderer not be identified but nor can the victim and there is no obvious motive.

The author, Josephine Tey, according to some sources was born in Inverness in 1897 and I included her, therefore, in this year's section of the project. Records now appear to show that she was born Elizabeth Mackintosh on 25 July 1896. I have transferred her to the list for that year. Her pseudonym included her mother’s forename and her English grandmother's surname. This novel was, however, first published under a male pseudonym (Gordon Daviot).

Sir John Gielgud, a close friend, suggested that she might have suffered a bereavement during the First World War. Throughout this novel, the author includes war service as a component of many of the male characters. In Chapter 4, she ascribes Inspector Grant’s alertness to his war service:
“he became conscious, with that sixth sense which four years on the Western Front and many more in the C.I.D. had developed to an abnormal acuteness, that he was being watched.”
Later in that chapter Grant reassures his landlady that he is not in grave danger:
“No one has ever spilt my blood except a Jerry at Contalmaison and that was more by luck than good management.”
Here the author points to him having served in a Scottish regiment, Contalmaison being most associated with the 16th Battalion of the Royal Scots.
In Chapter 6, when Grant is in pursuit of a suspect on the streets of London, he thinks to himself:
“Won't it be awful to die under a bus in the Strand after dodging the Bosche for four years!”

In Chapter 7 she uses the language of war to describe the investigation:
“Patiently Grant sifted the reports through the long, bright morning, sitting at his desk and sending his lieutenants out here and there as a general arranges his forces on a battlefield.”
Another example in the same chapter:
“A silence followed, dark and absolute. It was as if an advance guard, a scout, had spied out the land and gone away to report. There was the long, far-away sigh of the wind that had been asleep for days. Then the first blast of the fighting battalions of the rain struck the window in a wild rattle.”
Only someone who still had the war firmly in her consciousness would write such lines.

In Chapter 9 the plain-clothes policemen sent to do undercover investigations are pretending to be impoverished door-to-door salesmen who had served their country in the war:
“I was in the Army during the War. That's the only time bin in the Army counts. France? I was four years in France, miss.”

In subsequent chapters, the author mentions the war service of the murder victim and of the prime suspect, Gerald Lamont. When pursuing Lamont across a moor in the Scottish Highlands, Grant understands his elusiveness:
“He was heading somewhere. And for a townsman he was making a wonderful job of cover. But then, of course, there had been the War — Grant had forgotten that Lamont was old enough to have seen active service. He probably knew all that was to be known about the art of taking cover.”